Person:John Hugh (17)

About John Hugh

After landing at Philadelphia on July 17,1698, John Hugh and his family and shipmates settled on an 11,450 acre tract of land about 15 miles north of Philadelphia's Delaware River port facilities. They named the area Gwynedd after their home area in Wales. Among the original purchasers of this Township are the names, "John Hugh and John Humphery, Friends and Preachers." The land was heavily timbered with oaks, hickories, and chestnuts, and must have required a major effort to clear. Some sources say there were few, if any, Indians, but others talk about buying venison from the Indians. The settlers may have grown a little buck wheat between landing in July and settling in November, but it couldn't have been much. One source quotes a letter saying that the plowing was done very "bungerly." (4) There were berries and "Indian corn," but the first winter, at least, they almost certainly depended heavily for food on the largess of Welsh neighbors who had arrived in the 1680's and settled on a 40,000 acre "barony" to the south, where Philadelphia now (in 1998) is. Many of the Gwynedd settlers apparently lived in dugouts, and to have a cabin with "barked" (or peeled) logs was seen as a great step up. John: Generation One, Immigrant Born in 1653, John Hugh lived his first 45 years in Wales. He was a member of a web of related Welsh "clans" that had lived in the Denbighshire area of Wales for eight centuries or more. (5) His parents were Cadwalader Hugh and Gwen William. As with most other Welsh and English Quaker families, religion probably drove John's 1698 decision to migrate to Pennsylvania. He and his many neighbors who migrated around the same time undoubtedly sought to take advantage of the fortuitous availability of good land in Quaker Pennsylvania, which William Penn (a Quaker) had established in 1681, to escape rugged persecution of Quakers by the Church of England. John's original land purchase in Pennsylvania totaled 648 acres. This apparently remained the "home farm" until 1731, even though John began selling, or willing to his sons, parts of it in 1708, just ten years after arriving. In 1731, John moved to the Oley Valley area of Pennsylvania with his son Ellis and family. He died five years later in 1736 at the age of 83, and Quaker records list him as being the very first to be buried in the Exeter Meeting burial ground in the Oley Valley. John's patent (deed) descibed his 648 acres in Gwynedd as, "Beginning at the black oak (Horsham Corner); thence southwest by land of Thomas Sidow, and other land 844 perches to a black oak by land of Richard Whitpain and Co.; thence northwest by line of Whitpain 118 perches to a corner of William John's land; thence northeast 844 perches to a corner of Hugh Griffth's land and in Joseph Fisher's line; thence southeast by said line 128 perches to place of beginning." (6) John sold or willed his land in three parcels. The first in 1708 was to his oldest son, Rowland, who was willed a strip four-fifth of a mile long and two-fifths in breadth on the eastern corner. Also in 1708 John sold the middle 100 acres of his land to his neighbor, John Humphery. This piece was nearly square in shape, and is now (in 1998) traversed b the highway leading from the Springhouse to Three Tuns in the Gwynedd area. Ellis, John's second son and our next ancestor, later bought or was willed the remaining 359 acres. In 1732, following his 1731 move to the Oley Valley, Ellis sold 187 acres of his portion of John's original farm, but I have not found any record of when he sold the remainder. I believe that John was married three times. The records are sketchy and the information in them contradictory, but my best estimate is that Martha Caimot was his first wife and also the mother of at least three children, including Ellis. Martha, however, either died before John left Wales or during the voyage, because records show John as the farther of Rowland, Jane, and Ellis when he and Eleanor/Ellin/Ellen Ellis had two daughters, Margaret and Gainor, in 1702 and 1704, respectively. John then was a widower when he married Ellin Williams in February 1717. (7) Noted events in his life were: • He emigrated on the "Robert and Elizabeth" on 18 Apr 1698 from Liverpool, England. Sailed via Ireland, leaving there 1 May. about eleven weeks at sea. "And the sore distemper of the bloody flux broke out in the vessel, of which died in our passage, five and fourty persons. The distemper was so mortal that two or three corpses were cast overboard each day while it lasted." (Edward Foulke) • He immigrated on 17 Jul 1698 to Philadelphia, PA. John married (name unknown). Children from this marriage were: 2 M i. Ellis Hugh (Hughes)</b> was born on 10 Jan 1687 in Caernarvon, Conway, Wales and died on 11 Jan 1764 in Oley Twp., Berks Co., Pennsylvania, at age 77.